When we were kids we picked cherries a couple times. Mom canned cherries every summer it seemed. At least I remember eating them during many long winter months. I recall Gabe, Matt and I sneaking jars out to the barn and gobbling them up while sitting on top of the haystacks. We were starved for sweets....or so we thought! Shannon always commented on the copious amounts of bread and jam our family consumed, "Yeah, you guys had it pretty rough. You NEVER had anything sweet. How much jam did your mom go through in any given year?" That said, the cherries were another sweet that we didn't really factor in because they didn't fall into the processed-sugar-from-a-bag category.
I've wanted to head up to the Flathead and pick cherries for a couple years and finally got it done this summer. I had imagined green lawns and white pickets fences (always white picket fences!) with lush trees scattered throughout. The powdery, grey dirt surrounding the trees was not what I expected. But the trees were certainly lush and the cherries were profuse. I informed the guy we'd probably pick 30 pounds. That seemed like a reasonable quantity, without buying myself too much work.
We left the orchard with 90 pounds in boxes and who knows how many in our stomachs. Thankfully, there wasn't a weigh-in/weigh-out of each picker. We picnicked on the shore of the nearby lake and swam afterwards. My friend who tagged along with us got a taste of the craziness that is our life. It was somewhat funny as I pulled over on the side of the highway for multiple discipline sessions on the trip up and and back. A kid can only sit angelically in the car for so long I guess!
Like 10 minutes.
Nickles was, yet again, my faithful kitchen helper. I told him we were canning sunshine for grey winter days. Now we have 50 quarts of cherries, errr I mean sunshine, sitting on our pantry shelves. Whenever we pull a jar out, he's all about the sunshine he packed for a dreary day!
Peeking through the branches ~
The fruits of our labor.
Never mind.
There was no labor involved. We were pretty much done in 15 minutes!
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